Software application programs commonly referred to as personal information managers, or PIMs, have become extremely popular as a tool for organizing, tracking and managing personal information. One aspect of a PIM is a calendar application program which provides a user interface including a graphical representation of a calendar (generally user configurable to display a day, week, month, etc.). Using the calendar interface, a user may record appointments, events and other information. Calendar application programs also provide automatic notifications and reminders about specific tasks and upcoming appointments and events. Calendar application programs typically communicate and exchange information with other PIM application programs, such as for example email and contact application programs, as well as other data stores.
A calendar interface provided by a calendar application program may be private or shared. Private calendars are accessible by authorized user(s) upon entry of the proper login credentials, and may store a user's personal appointments, events and other personal information. Private calendar application programs may either be stored locally on a client device, or centrally within a host server accessible via a network such as the Internet. Owners of private calendars can also set them up to be shared with others, but as used herein, these are still considered private calendars as permission of the owner is required before it may be accessed. Shared calendars may store events and other public information, and are accessible to all users without any one user having to grant permission for their use. Shared calendar application programs are typically stored centrally within a host server accessible via a network such as the Internet.
Calendar application programs have traditionally not included targeted ad placement. Current ad word and other advertising models have instead targeted content based interactive services. A good example is a web-hosted search engine, where advertisers bid on keywords, and have their advertisements displayed to a user when the user enters those keywords in a search query. In such models, advertisers typically pay the website host based on the number of times their ad is clicked. Advertisers are also purchasing keywords in other content based interactive services, such as for example in email application programs and Instant Messaging (IM) application programs. As in the search engine ad model, advertisers bid on keywords, and have their advertisements displayed to a user when those keywords are used in an email or message from the user.
By contrast, keyword ad models would work poorly with web-hosted calendar application programs, as the events that are added to calendars seldom convey information that would be valuable to advertisers in targeting consumers. Thus, while it is known to include ads on a calendar interface, these ads are not targeted, and as such, provide less value to advertisers.